Tag Archives: family

My dears, lately I have been swimming in so much family cuteness, and I have had no time to actually blog it. Seriously – I had a 7 Quick Takes post for last Friday almost complete, which was entirely about various family members being cute. Hopefully that post will still see the light of day. In the meantime my niece Little Bug turned 2 yesterday, and she’s kinda adorable.

One day while I was recovering from my surgery at my parents’ house, Little Bug came to visit me. She saw my sewing thimble, and immediately asked me to fill it with water so that she could drink out of it. She was convinced that it was a special tiny little cup for little girls to drink out of. So I filled it up, and she drank several little cups of water. It was just about the cutest thing I’ve ever seen. When I posted about it on facebook, someone (I can’t remember who) asked for pictures. Unfortunately, I’d been too busy enjoying my niece to take any.

Not too long ago, at a family gathering, Little Bug saw my sewing thimble again. I offered to fill it with water for her. This time I got pictures.

The Young Queen and I are sitting in the same room together (something that doesn’t happen very often), and resolutely not talking to each other. Both of us have work we need to do – she has various job-related emails, I have a blog post to write – but if we start talking neither of us will get a thing done. I was thinking about what it says about our friendship that we can be in the same room and silent with one another. Though perhaps just saying that she is here, specifically to help me as I recover from my surgery, is enough. Regardless, I am very glad that she has come!

My smooth recovery from surgery has become a bit bumpy. I haven’t been recouping my strength or energy the way I would like. Last weekend the reason for this slowness became plain when my incision reopened in two places, showing the infection that had been beneath. The openings are not large, so the doctor prescribed a regimen of frequent dousing with hydrogen peroxide followed by clean dressings. I dutifully doused, and by the time I saw him on Monday, the infection was mostly gone. However, one of the openings is still there, and will require careful tending until it closes. So I am continuing with the peroxide treatment, and we’ll see how things are in a week.

Meanwhile, The Young Queen has been awesome, helping relieve Mom and Indy a bit, and being rather strict about not allowing me to overtax myself. This is a good thing – I tend to just keep going until I’m utterly exhausted and near collapse. So a friend who doesn’t hesitate to turn off the movie and send me off to bed is a rare and wonderful friend indeed. She’s also been doing lovely things like tending my rose garden, something I’ve only had time to occasionally think about with regret. She tells me that both my white and pink roses are blooming, which makes me very happy. I’m hoping that by the end of this week I might be well enough to walk over and see for myself.

Everyone is very busy around here these days. The preparations for AnniePott’s wedding are starting to enter the final phase. Indy has another craft night scheduled for Wednesday, where hopefully we’ll be able to produce the miles of garlands needed to decorate the reception site. The Duchess and 007 are working hard on getting their new house habitable. They’re getting closer – the electricity is on now, and hopefully any time they’ll have the plumbing to the point where they can get the water turned on. Right now the plan is to start actually living there in early July. They’ve had a long, hard struggle to get into a place of their own, and I know they’re looking forward to it very much!

My busyness is mostly working on the Super Secret Wedding Project, and doing my best to get better. It is a little frustrating to have so much technically free time on my hands, and so little energy to do anything with it! Hopefully that will fix itself soon . I can’t wait until it does!

I have been spending a fair chunk of my evening sending various bits of reassurance out into the internets – emailing coworkers, etc. to let them know that I am ok. This is the first time I’ve had a little energy to spare for such endeavors, which is a good measure of what the last week or so has been like. While I am about it, I thought I would let you dear readers also know that I am still alive and kicking, and as far as we can tell, quite robustly on the mend!

My surgery was Wednesday, and the days leading up to it were pretty dire. I started bleeding again two weekends ago, and no matter how many iron supplements I took, by last weekend I couldn’t stand up for more than a few minutes at a time without getting all wobbly and woozy. I continued to work the whole last week, partly because I needed to train my replacement, partly because I didn’t think I could afford to miss the work hours, and partly from sheer stubbornness. Yeah, it’s a curse.

This led to a situation where my family did not quite realize how bad off I was until I showed up to the Memorial Day cookout, and couldn’t walk into the kitchen to get my own food. However, once my family understood how things were, they pitched in amazingly. Mom and Indy undertook to make sure I had meals, Mariah and The Duchess came over to help me clean, and even Dad helped me do laundry. By Tuesday night, the house was looking in pretty good order. On Wednesday morning, Indy came over to help me pack up my essentials, and Mom and Dad escorted me to the hospital for my procedure.

The surgery itself went well. My doctor was able to remove both the original fibroid we’ve been dealing with, and another smaller fibroid that had been hiding behind the first one. He said that everything looked good, and he thinks it should heal quite nicely and be nearly good as new. They kept me overnight after the surgery, as we had expected. However, when they tested my hemoglobin levels the next morning, they were alarmingly low (6.5 – even lower than when all this started last October). So I spent most of Thursday getting a blood transfusion in one arm with a morphine pump hooked up to the other.

On the bright side, the blood transfusion made me feel better than I had for days. Thursday afternoon I was able to go to the bathroom under my own steam (it’s the little things), and Thursday night they let me have a real dinner. After a quiet night, they agreed that I could be released into the care of my family, and Friday afternoon Dad came to take me home.

So here I am, safely in the bosom of my family. They are taking excellent care of me. Mom and Indy have been keeping my water cup full, and making delicacies to tempt my appetite. On Friday night when my temperature spiked, Dad had a chance to literally “wipe my fevered brow.” Dad is also the one who made sure to bring the Eucharist home to me from Mass this weekend.

Myself, I have mostly been doing my best impression of a limp noodle. Yesterday my big accomplishment was getting myself cleaned up and into clean clothes. Today I did that, plus visiting with Mai and her sweet baby, and now sending out emails. Even though Indy set up a lovely nest for me upstairs (complete with flowers at the head of the bed, a fluffy rug on the floor beside it, and supports over the bed so I can pull myself up without using my injured abdominal muscles), I’m still on the couch downstairs, right about where I plopped down as soon as I walked in the door Friday. Maybe tomorrow I’ll make the move.

So little by little I’m getting better. I have grand plans of more blogging to come. I have the most ridiculously glorious wedding invitations to show you (Indy has outdone herself), and a few little projects I’ve been working on, plus maybe now I can seize the opportunity to write about something besides my health (the idea!). Things are looking up!

My dears, we are in the home stretch now. My surgery is less than a week away. I spent yesterday tying up the last loose ends at work. On Thursday I finished training the girl who will be sitting in for me while I’m out. My prescriptions for post-surgery meds are filled, and this morning I went in for the pre-op blood work and EKG. Now all that’s left is getting my house in tolerable order (good enough that I can leave it for at least two weeks), and packing up what I’ll need at Mom & Dad’s after the surgery. So this weekend I’m doing laundry, and trying to sort out crafting supplies.

However, we are not out the woods yet. Last weekend I started bleeding again. Pretty badly. The same horrible floods that I had really hoped to never experience again. My doctor prescribed meds that are supposed to be helping, but so far I can’t tell that they’re doing anything. So the past week has been an exercise in sheer hanging on by my fingernails endurance.

Honestly, I am so done with this. If my house were in order, I would be happy to go this minute to the nearest ER, where they would probably give me a blood transfusion and then rush me into emergency surgery. But I’m not ready, and my regular surgery date is so close, and it would just be so much fuss. It’s easier to stay home, pop iron supplements, and put a load of laundry through when I can stand up that long. And, yes, I’ve talked about this with my doctor.

Plus, I’m not doing this alone. AP is here right now doing odd jobs for me. He just ordered a pizza, so I don’t have to figure out lunch. Mariah has invited me to dinner, and then I’ll be at the Family Homestead tomorrow. Monday morning Ms. Jones is taking me to breakfast, and the Young Queen is making plans to come help look after me after the surgery. Little by little, I’m being helped towards my finish line.

I don’t know how much blogging I will be able to do over the next few weeks. It might be very little, or you might get whole painkiller-fueled screeds. (A particular Rx painkiller both makes me chatty and also lowers my inhibitions against telling the world my opinions on everything. At length. Yes, I do have some inhibitions on that. Oh, hush!) Either way, sooner or later I’ll let you know how this goes. I always do. Please keep me in your prayers until then.

Bl. Thomas Pickering
So I keep reading this 7 Quick Takes Friday thing on various blogs, and thinking how handy it would be to clear out all the random little things I want to write about that aren’t quite right for a whole post. Except I’m never thinking this on Friday, and apparently I’m not enough of a rebel to ignore the rules of a meme entirely. Also, since when have I ever been able to write only a little about anything? However, by some magical confluence of things, here I am on a Friday, all ready to talk about things. Seven of them. Quickly. At least in theory. We’ll see how this goes.

I had a birthday last week (more on that later), and my parents took me out to the Chinese buffet. I had an amazing time watching the Little Philosopher fling bits of hard boiled egg all over the floor while singing a happy egg song. Afterwards, I exercised my Aunt’s Privilege of filling the small child full of sugar and then sending her home. A good time was had by all (well, by me and the Little Philosopher at least). Then, when I opened up my fortune cookie at the end of the meal, I found this.

Friends, that’s not a fortune. At least I hope it isn’t. That’s lyrics from Phantom of the Opera, specifically from The Music of the Night. And, yeah, it’s a great song, but it’s also creepy. There’s a reason they shelve that book in the Horror section. I’m now re-reading the section of the Catechism on superstition, and choosing to believe that this only means the fortune cookie fortune writer loves show tunes, not any sort of portent for my future.

I saw this article on improving relationships by asking better questions, and it made me think of one of my sort-of coworkers. She worked in our HR department for years until she retired to be a stay at home mom, but we keep her officially on the payroll so she can help out with occasional special projects, and come to our Christmas dinner. She’s a sort of HR Emeritus. Anyway, she has the most amazing Asking-Questions-Fu I have ever seen. It’s incredible. You know all the questions you’re always dying to ask, but you don’t because polite people don’t do that? Stuff like: So when are you guys going to have kids? Why are you not married to the woman you’ve been living with for five years who is the mother of your children? What made you think doing that to your hair was a good idea? All of those. Except she does it so skillfully, and so kindly that people answer her and are not offended. They even seem to like it. It blows my mind. I want to sit at her feet and Learn Her Ways. I’m a little afraid that it might be one of those talents that is inborn, and not learnable. However, since I read the article, I’ve been working on being a little more courageous about asking questions. So far no one has gotten mad at me, so I think it’s working. I think.

May and Mother’s Day mean strawberries to me, and I’m always looking for ways to enjoy fruit that don’t involve added sugar. This recipe for Black Pepper Strawberry Butteralmost qualifies, close enough that I bet I could fudge it. And it looks so pretty!

AnniPotts and Cuthbert did not get the house. However, the owners of the house they had been looking at earlier offered them that house for the amount of their original bid. So it looks like they’re going ahead with that house, which is a very nice one even if it isn’t as amazing as the one they were hoping for.

Sometimes when I get discouraged about the state of gender relationships in our world, it helps to see stories about really good men who are willing to do hard things to benefit the women in their life. For example, there’s this man in India, who realized that his wife was enduring a lot of hardship and discomfort because she did not have access to affordable sanitary supplies for her monthly period. So he set out find a way to make cheaper menstrual pads. His sudden interest in menstruation made everyone think he’d gone crazy. People thought he was a pervert, and began shunning him. His wife left him. However, he persevered, and built a machine that makes pads cheaply and easily. He won an award, and his wife came back. He now builds the machines and gives them to women at no cost, so that they can use them to set up their own small business manufacturing pads. He says, “I have accumulated no money but I accumulate a lot of happiness.”

Speaking of hope for the future, here’s an awesome letter from E.B. White to a man who was losing hope in humanity. My favorite line: “Hang on to your hat. Hang on to your hope. And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day.”

Last, but definitely not least, (and this one really deserves its own blog post), please pray for the Stolen Girls of Nigeria. I hope most of you already know what I’m talking about, but for those of you who don’t, on April 14 an Islamic terrorist group which I refuse to name attacked a girl’s school in Nigeria and abducted 273 teenage girls who were there taking their final exams. The government of Nigeria’s response has included denying that this ever happened, arresting people who protest their inaction, and blaming the girls’ parents. The terrorists have released gloating videos in which they state their plans to sell all of the girls into slavery. At least two of the girls have died.

The groundswell of outrage from the rest of the world has been building, and various nations including the US have announced that they are planning to make plans to help Nigeria find the girls. There is not a whole lot that we as individuals can do, except try to help spread the word about the girls’ plight, and to pray for them. Many of the girls’ parents have been reluctant to share the girls’ names for fear that, when the girls return home, they will be stigmatized and shamed. However, a list has been released by a local clergyman with 180 of the girls names. You can find the list here. In the words of David Curp:

If you follow the link, you will find listed the names of the identified kidnapping victims of [terrorist organization name redacted]. I challenge believers everywhere to lift up these girls, individually, by name, not in a mass prayer, but each child as if she were your own – whether Christian or Muslim – and intercede on behalf of them.
They are Daniels in the lions den.
They are Josephs, sold into slavery
They are Paul & Silas, in chains for the sake of the Gospel
They are Esthers and Sarais
They are our sisters and our daughters…

I have personally committed myself to praying for each one of these girls, one a day, for as long as it takes to pray for all of them, even after they come home (please, God, bring them home!). Yesterday my rosary on the way in to work was for Awa Abge. Today I am praying for Hauwa Yirma. By doing this, I hope to not only send them the best help I can right now, but also simply to remember them, each young woman who is far from home and in danger. I am asking you to do the same.

Sarah Whittle, coral stitch: You can use different thread thicknesses or change the angle of the knot to give different effects. Coral stitch can be used on straight or curved lines as well as being used as a textured filling stitch. When using as a filling stitch place the knots into spaces between the knots of the previous row .